Keith H. Hirokawa

Sustainability and the Urban Forest: An Ecosystem Services Perspective

Recently, urban forests have drawn attention due to interest in the idea that urban forests provide essential ecosystem services. Indeed, urban forests provide the benefits of a natural, cost effective system of green infrastructure: trees capture air and water pollutants, as well as provide shade, habitat, and even social structure. These services have a surprising but significant economic value, and attention to the design of urban forests can be a local means of capturing that value. From an ecosystem services perspective, the urban forest also reveals that the very existence of the nature in the urban area occurs as both a conceptual and a physical construct. That is, trees in the urban area result from intention and design. This essay argues that urban forestry is a local opportunity to engage in an exercise of self-determination and local identity. Urban forestry requires an investigation into the ties between the communitys environmental, economic, and social needs, a realization of the potential of space and natural infrastructure, and a manipulation of the services provided by trees. Understanding the nature of urban forests as urban, contingent, and constructed empowers local governments to become ecosystem beneficiaries by effectively bringing nature into their communities.

Driving Local Governments to Watershed Governance

This article examines two recent developments in watershed protection. First, the growth of ecosystem services research has reframed the manner in which value accrues in natural resources. At the intersection of economics and ecology, the study of ecosystem services has supported the attribution of economic value to ecosystem processes. Second, local governments are participating quite intentionally in watershed management by identifying with particular watersheds, particular watershed features, and particular watershed functions, in ways that other entities lack the institutional capacity to do. These developments are important for watershed protection in ways not previously seen: even if they leave political boundaries intact, when local governments protect watershed functionality, they are acting to preserve natural capital, and natural capital is geographically situated in ways that defy the sanctity of political boundaries. This article addresses the importance of driving local governments to watershed planning and management by introducing the perspective of ecosystem and watershed services. Part II of this article discusses the complexity of functional watersheds and identifies watershed features that can be categorized in ecosystem services terms as the provisioning, regulating, cultural, and supporting services. By discussing watershed services, this part identifies the valuable ecosystem services in watersheds and the objectives of watershed investments. Part II furthermore explores the nature of watershed planning in the context of existing regulatory, property, and sovereignty ownership schemes for the purpose of identifying the level at which local governments are held to account for watershed investments. This part explores the notion that local governments are so grounded relative to watersheds that the task of identifying and satisfying local needs and parochial perspectives – often thought to impede sound environmental planning – should be considered a primary driver in a collaborative and developing process. Part III of this article discusses the manner in which the ecosystem services perspective illuminates particular local governance needs.

Adapting agriculture through land use controls

The practice of land use control is an exercise in building (or losing) adaptive capacity in communities. Land use choices, and the regulatory schemes that govern them, determine the location, character, and intensity of the community’s impact on the environment, vulnerability to change, and resources that can be relied upon. For example, land use regulations influence the locations of different land uses and therefore determine the distances people travel to home, work, and play (and therefore determine air, water and land impacts from transportation, as well as infrastructure needs, psychological impacts of travel, and so on). Not surprisingly, land use control is the primary tool that local governments employ to confront new challenges to the social, economic, and environmental fabric of community. This chapter examines some exemplary resiliency strategies that are being employed at the local level. This chapter does not assert that local control over agricultural practices is the best or only answer to the climate challenge. The land use component of agricultural resiliency is arguably limited because of the role that parochialism plays in defining local environmental and economic concerns. Nevertheless local participation in climate change solutions is considered a necessity, and the types of solutions that local governments produce are important. Land use control is a uniquely local practice that is universally driven by the need to protect local priorities, facilitate local identities, and even to foster local and individual opportunities. Land use control addresses challenges such as climate change because the failure to do so results in the failure of local government to govern.

The Cost of Federalism: Ecology, Community, and the Pragmatism of Land Use

If there is a victim of federalism, it is undoubtedly the community. Localities, in contrast to the federal government, have a very real stake in the quality of ecosystem functionality, because localities rely on ecosystem services as the beneficiaries of those services. When local governments regulate land uses to prevent degradation of important local ecosystems, they regulate from a purposes that non-local governments simply do not have. This book chapter examines the exercise of federal control over environmental issues and its potential assault on the merits of community. The chapter explores whether imposed homogeneity or sameness at the federal level defeats the benefits of self-identifying communities through land use controls and, if so, whether that is a trade-off we are willing to accept. Our objective is to help clarify the impact of federal regulation on local land use control and to more completely articulate how federal regulation detaches a community from its local ecosystem.

Curtailing Ecosystem Exportation: Ecosystem Services As a Basis to Reconsider the Merits of Export-Driven Agriculture in Economies Highly Dependent on Agricultural Exports

This essay explores the impact of export-driven agricultural policies on the governance of natural capital. Many developing countries have adopted trade liberalization policies that encourage the intensive production of export commodities such as coffee, tea, flowers, and green beans. The primary focus of such policies is maximizing agricultural productivity and global competitiveness, which have been identified as critical factors in promoting economic growth and reducing poverty. When viewed from the perspective of ecosystem services, however, export-driven trade policies are problematic. Export-driven agricultural trade policies leave no incentive to preserve the natural capital upon which the very success of such trade policies is predicated. This essay argues that export-driven agricultural trade policies do not take into account their impact on ecosystem services. Yet, ecosystems provide critical services such as clean and ample water supplies, biodiversity, nutrient cycling, climate regulation, and carbon sequestration. These services are critical to the success of export driven agriculture. In fact, where ecosystem processes fail or are otherwise interrupted, man-made substitutes must be put in place at a substantial cost. In order for developing countries to maximize productivity, this essay argues that export-led trade policies must be sustainable and as such incorporate the need to sustain the productivity of natural capital.

Town, Gown and Place-Based Sustainability: Collaborating in the Shared Space

The locational and spatial circumstances of town and gown present opportunities to advance sustainability. This essay examines these areas of opportunity by proposing collaborative frameworks between town and gown. In what we describe as “place-based collaborations,” we identify three areas for productive collaboration by two mutually compatible institutions. Part I of this essay introduces the impacts of the sustainable curriculum and other projects that implement the educational mission of the institution, including the more progressive notion that pedagogical strategies for engaged learning, combined with the introduction of sustainability in the curriculum, may serve as drivers for nested sustainable practices. Part II considers the special relationship that towns may foster in their nested universities by recognizing shared space. Part III illustrates interaction and collaboration possibilities that build on the intellectual capital occurring in educational institutions.

Contextualizing the Roots of Environmental Law

This review of Karl Boyd Brooks, Before Earth Day: The Origins of American Environmental Law, 1945–1970 (2009), considers an attempt to describe the law’s “environmental history” through a narrative account of incrementalism. The author’s deep research and skillful storytelling takes us into the struggles of early environmental advocates, who yearned to become citizens of a broader biotic community and catalyzed tensions between nature and politics and property. The author capitalizes on the co-dependencies of human and environmental sovereignty and reveals the continuous interplay of human action, nature, and legal evolution. Despite making tremendous discoveries about the emergence of environmental law, the book makes a further claim. The author suggests that most commentators erroneously focus on the environmental decade of the 1970s, instead of the roots that took hold and flourished in the post war period. In so doing, the author argues, most commentators fail to grasp the political, economic and environmental commitments made prior to the 1970s. This essay argues that although environmental law has always appeared at the crossroads of environmental challenge, economic needs, property, identity, and community, we cannot avoid the environmental law of the 1970s, when the convergence of disciplines informed our regulatory approach and when the immediate need for environmental quality became part of the law.